A landmark biography. Montefiore goes a long way toward rescuing Potemkin from his promiscuous action-figure reputation by...
A life of Prince Potemkin that starts out as an artful pot-boiler, then turns into a possessing diplomatic history of Potemkin’s role in Russia’s last great push for empire.
So often caricatured as an arrogant and indolent debauchée, Potemkin gets his record set straight: recklessly indulgent, yes, but a force of nature, relentlessly ambitious, inspired and quixotic, the guiding figure of Catherine II’s rule. From the moment Potemkin first takes the Empress’s notice to his death on the Bessarabian steppe, Montefiore dogs his heels, building the case for Potemkin as an equal of Peter the Great: expanding the empire, building the Black Sea Fleet, taking the Crimea and establishing the likes of Sebastopol and Odessa. In particular, he demonstrates how Potemkin and Catherine’s evolving relationship, from lovers to what amounts to co-rulers, was an alliance remarkable for both its intimacy and statecraft. After Potemkin left Catherine’s bed for good, he devised an imperial ménage à trois, supplying the Empresses with suitable lovers but always remaining the real man of the household, a perfect arrangement for the two willful, dominating personalities. Potemkin’s “scientific longing for knowledge, mercantile enthusiasm, and purely imperial aggrandizement” shines through, as do his abilities as a soldier and a military tactician. Montefiore keeps readers’ interest piqued with a fascination of minutiae, for instance a terrific day-in-the-life chapter of the subject when he was in his 40s, or his development of a silk industry on his Crimean mulberry plantations, or a thorough debunking of the “Potemkin Village” malarky, how he might have lost his eye, how he most certainly took his nieces as mistresses. That he ruled “like an emperor” from the River Bug to the Caspian, from the Caucasus almost to Kiev, is evidence enough of his mark on history.
A landmark biography. Montefiore goes a long way toward rescuing Potemkin from his promiscuous action-figure reputation by justifiably rubbing a fair share of Catherine’s greatness off onto, in Jeremy Bentham’s words, the Prince of Princes.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27815-2
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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